Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

“Current neuroscientific interest in
choices that feel ‘free’ stems largely from Libet's initially
unpopular, yet pioneering work using physiological markers to predict
choices prior to a participant's own awareness of the ‘urge’ to
choose a particular action [1].
The influence of this work was greatly enhanced following Haggard and
Eimer's (1999) discovery that lateralized readiness potentials
correlated with and predicted conscious choices and subsequent
studies have extended this approach to attempt trial-by-trial
predictions of free-choices on the basis of physiological markers of
unconscious processing [2].
Such predictions exploit natural co-variation in physiological
markers of unconscious processes and verbal reports of conscious
choices to infer that the former cause the latter. However, the
nature of this relationship is far from transparent and has been
recently challenged [3].
Schurger and colleagues' experiments and accumulator model suggest
that it is only an indirect relationship, mediated by other
processes. Moreover, such correlative procedures are conceptually
limited in that they cannot distinguish endogenous, unconscious
initiation of ‘free willed’ choices [4]
from external control of choices postulated by more radical,
‘illusionist’ perspectives [5].
This latter debate centres on the degree of control that
unconsciously-perceived stimuli in our immediate environment can
control choices, not as a function of rendering one choice more
attractive than another [6],
[7]
but rather by directly influencing choice mechanisms. Accordingly,
some recent work has adopted an alternative approach that promises to
reveal more directly the origins of control over our choices.

“The current findings reinforce the
conclusions of previous work [18],
[30],
[31]
that activation of task selection by unconscious stimuli can
influence the efficiency of cued task selection and can bias
participants to select one of two tasks in a ‘free’ choice
procedure. Such influences appear to undermine the folk psychological
intuition that our choices (whether cued or ‘freely’ chosen) are
ultimately under our conscious, considered control rather than
exogenous and unconscious processes. Indeed, these very types of
influence have been cited as evidence that human adults' assumption
of ‘free’ (independent of immediate environmental control) over
their choices must be delusory.

“A second, novel feature of our
findings was that in both cued and free-choice task selection
paradigms that conscious perception of a prime shape prior
to an instruction to perform a task (and subsequent performance of
that task) seems to prevent any further control of task selection by
those unconscious shapes. Should this pattern of findings prove to
generalise across paradigms (we have replicated it in one further set
of conditions, not reported here for brevity) this would suggest that
unconscious stimuli can control task selection processes only when
they are either exclusively unconscious (not conscious on any trials)
or explicitly treated as task relevant by the participant.
Task-irrelevant, unconscious stimuli that sometimes achieve conscious
perception will likely not influence task selection when presented
unconsciously; conscious perception of them on some trials would
prevent their influence as they did in the studies reported here
(indeed, a further study, not reported here intermixed trials in this
unpredictable manner and found no influence of the unconscious
stimuli).

“At first glance this latter
conclusion might not seem to impact the widespread assumption that
unconscious stimuli can control task selection. However, we suggest
that it greatly narrows the ranges of stimuli in everyday viewing
conditions that will be able to control choices. Only task-irrelevant
stimuli that are reliably perceived unconsciously such that they can
become associated with and influence task selection, yet are never
consciously perceived (resulting in suppression of that learning)
will be very rare events indeed. Accordingly, our current findings
suggest that, beyond the highly controlled conditions of the
laboratory, task choices may generally approach independence from
unconscious environmental stimuli. That is, our laboratory findings
seem broadly to accord with participants' own subjective assessment
that their choices are not controlled by stimuli within the immediate
environment. Accordingly, these results raise the possibility that
participants' assumptions about their own autonomy from immediate
environmental control may veridically (to a degree) reflect their
autonomy outside the laboratory and only reflect inaccurately
environmental control of their decisions within the laboratory-
conditions of which they have limited experience.”